BRUTALISM VS. NICENESS

posted by James Reel

Composer, biographer and music essayist Jan Swafford, with whom I worked a little on a couple of his past visits to Tucson, has concocted a wonderful little guide to white he identifies as the three most prominent streams in contemporary art music: spectralism (a commonly used term), aesthetic brutalism (which he borrows from an aging architectural movement) and new niceness (which sounds and is rather condescending, but aptly describes the sort of music most people are going to want to hear, and with good reason). Here's the full article.